Understanding student leadership development in a university marching band program

Abstract

University marching bands utilize students to lead their peers for a variety of purposes including, but not limited to, building musical capacities, delegating staff responsibilities, increasing group comradery, individualizing the approach to teaching and motivating, and building life skills amongst the students. University band programs work to incorporate musical, personal, and leadership experiences through the act of music-making in which student leaders develop effective leadership skills. Student leaders are allotted opportunities to grow in confidence, leadership skills, and motivational techniques as they interacted with and teach their peers. Leadership education provides guidelines and models for understanding student leadership development. Two of these models can help to clarify three aspects of development occurring and how those aspects join together to create the bigger picture of a student's leadership capacity: readiness, willingness, and ability. Through a post hoc case study utilizing an R1 university marching band program, student leaders were selected and interviewed to better understand how they developed over their tenure of positional leadership. The findings addressed the research question in better understanding students’ development in self-efficacy, motivation to lead peers, gained leadership skills, and overall leadership development. Findings also revealed additional aspects of student leadership development from the perspective of the participants. The researcher utilized multiple interviews with nine participants, stimulated recall, and observation to better understand the participants’ reflection of development. Understanding how students are developing and why can provide educators with guidelines and processes for training and assessing student leaders in a university marching band.